The Benefits of Brutally Honest Feedback

Posted: 11/05/2016 by
Cox Purtell

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string(3242) "As a recruiter, I am often given limited or very conservative feedback on a candidate’s interview performance. If I can offer one piece of advice here it would be to always provide detailed feedback - blood, guts and all!
The beauty of using a Recruitment Agency is that clients are free to be brutally honest with their feedback. It is the job of a consultant to then feed this back to the candidate in a more diplomatic manner and to turn the potential criticism of the candidate into constructive feedback for their future interviews.
This has two benefits:
1) By giving detailed feedback on why the candidate is wonderful or why they are disastrously wrong for the job (hopefully with an experienced consultant who knows your business and needs, this will not happen) you will be helping to refine the search criteria for the role. Hopefully this will result in a more efficient hiring process not only now, but also in the future when you return to that consultant with future roles.
2) By providing the recruitment consultant with feedback, whether it is scathing and brutal or hugely complimentary, this type of constructive criticism can then be used by the candidate to learn and develop their interview technique moving forward. If a candidate has taken the time out of their day and spent money on travelling to the interview, this is the least we can do for them!
Yes, it can be embarrassing and not the easiest conversation to have, however, us recruitment consultants do this day in, day out and we know how to re-phrase feedback so it comes across as constructive and can really help candidates in their search for the right role.
Whilst on the topic, I feel it prudent to point out feedback should be provided in a timely fashion so that the finer details of the interview can be bought to our attention and not lost in the abyss of the recruitment process.
Feedback can also work both ways. Often I will speak to a candidate who has felt intimidated in an interview and has been put off the role purely by the interview technique of the client. In my last blog, I wrote about how an interview is a two way process and the client needs to sell the role to the candidate as much as the candidate needs to sell their skills. In one particular example, I had to feedback to the client that all three of my candidates who had recently interviewed with them had not wanted to proceed with the role because the client came across as a bully. This was, admittedly, a harder conversation to have!
In the words of Winston Churchill: "Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."
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As a recruiter, I am often given limited or very conservative feedback on a candidate’s interview performance. If I can offer one piece of advice here it would be to always provide detailed feedback – blood, guts and all!

The beauty of using a Recruitment Agency is that clients are free to be brutally honest with their feedback. It is the job of a consultant to then feed this back to the candidate in a more diplomatic manner and to turn the potential criticism of the candidate into constructive feedback for their future interviews.

This has two benefits:

1) By giving detailed feedback on why the candidate is wonderful or why they are disastrously wrong for the job (hopefully with an experienced consultant who knows your business and needs, this will not happen) you will be helping to refine the search criteria for the role. Hopefully this will result in a more efficient hiring process not only now, but also in the future when you return to that consultant with future roles.

2) By providing the recruitment consultant with feedback, whether it is scathing and brutal or hugely complimentary, this type of constructive criticism can then be used by the candidate to learn and develop their interview technique moving forward. If a candidate has taken the time out of their day and spent money on travelling to the interview, this is the least we can do for them!

Yes, it can be embarrassing and not the easiest conversation to have, however, us recruitment consultants do this day in, day out and we know how to re-phrase feedback so it comes across as constructive and can really help candidates in their search for the right role.

Whilst on the topic, I feel it prudent to point out feedback should be provided in a timely fashion so that the finer details of the interview can be bought to our attention and not lost in the abyss of the recruitment process.

Feedback can also work both ways. Often I will speak to a candidate who has felt intimidated in an interview and has been put off the role purely by the interview technique of the client. In my last blog, I wrote about how an interview is a two way process and the client needs to sell the role to the candidate as much as the candidate needs to sell their skills. In one particular example, I had to feedback to the client that all three of my candidates who had recently interviewed with them had not wanted to proceed with the role because the client came across as a bully. This was, admittedly, a harder conversation to have!

In the words of Winston Churchill: “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”